I’ve admired the beauty of the wild trout found by President Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery since the first time I caught one while wading a sandy beach of Yellowstone Lake in the spring of 1974. The species is called “cutthroat” because of a vivid reddish-orange slash curving across each lower jaw.

It’s a famous island in the Atlantic Ocean that’s the perfect outdoor summer playground—secluded yet accessible. Its 21 square miles boast more golf courses per mile than anywhere else in the world. This enchanting destination has hosted the PGA Grand Slam of Golf, exciting equestrian matches, and a prestigious yacht race from Newport, Rhode Island.

I dipped my paddle into the crystal-clear saltwater shallows and set off a series of minor explosions. Instantly, a dozen elegant, squawking great egrets leaped into the air from a grove of leathery-leafed mangroves. Then a school of silvery baby tarpon erupted, splashing beneath the prehistoric-looking, reddish-orange dangling roots.

In any season, few Appalachian vistas can rival the views from the mile-high Blue Ridge Parkway, which connects Virginia’s Shenandoah highlands with North Carolina’s Great Smokies. When I visited, the freshly unfurled leaves of oaks and maples were green. The flowering tulip poplars appeared yellowish-green. Pollen fluff floated on air through the slanting sun. In the distance, bluish layers of the mountainsides were festooned with flowering white dogwood and blooming pink redbud.

During the 1960s, when Sean Gallagher was 16, his mother took him fishing for steelhead on the Skagit River in northern Washington State, on the Canadian border. In the young Gallagher—now a retired teacher living in the shadow of Mount Rainier—the experience ignited a passionate pursuit of the giant sea-run rainbow trout.